{"id":66,"date":"2020-11-02T13:35:18","date_gmt":"2020-11-02T18:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/fundamentalsbusiness\/chapter\/ownershipforms\/"},"modified":"2024-12-07T00:17:07","modified_gmt":"2024-12-07T05:17:07","slug":"ownershipforms","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/fundamentalsbusiness\/chapter\/ownershipforms\/","title":{"raw":"Chapter 7 - Forms of Business Ownership","rendered":"Chapter 7 – Forms of Business Ownership"},"content":{"raw":"
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Learning Objectives<\/h1>\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n\r\nBy the end of the chapter, you should be able to:\r\n
    \r\n \t
  1. identify the questions to ask in choosing the appropriate form of ownership for a business;<\/li>\r\n \t
  2. describe the sole proprietorship and partnership forms of organization, and specify the advantages and disadvantages;<\/li>\r\n \t
  3. identify the different types of partnerships, and explain the importance of a partnership agreement;<\/li>\r\n \t
  4. explain how corporations are formed and how they operate;<\/li>\r\n \t
  5. discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the corporate form of ownership;<\/li>\r\n \t
  6. examine special types of business ownership, including limited liability companies, cooperatives, and not-for-profit corporations;<\/li>\r\n \t
  7. define mergers and acquisitions, and explain why companies are motivated to merge or acquire other companies; and<\/li>\r\n \t
  8. explain [pb_glossary id=\"456\"]key terms[\/pb_glossary] in the chapter.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n\"\"\r\n

    \u00a0Show What You Know<\/h2>\r\n

    [h5p id=\"13\"]<\/p>\r\n\r\n

    <\/div>\r\n

    The Ice Cream Men<\/h1>\r\n

    Who would have thought it? Two ex-hippies with strong interests in social activism would end up starting one of the best-known ice cream companies in the country \u2014 Ben & Jerry\u2019s. Perhaps it was meant to be. Ben Cohen (the \u201cBen\u201d of Ben & Jerry\u2019s) always had a fascination with ice cream. As a child, he made his own mixtures by smashing his favorite cookies and candies into his ice cream.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_62\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]\"Ben Figure 7.1 Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield from https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org licensed CC BY SA[\/caption]\r\n

    But it wasn\u2019t until his senior year in high school that he became an official \u201cice cream man,\u201d happily driving his truck through neighborhoods filled with kids eager to buy his ice cream pops. After high school, Ben tried college but it wasn\u2019t for him. He attended Colgate University for a year and a half before he dropped out to return to his real love: being an ice cream man. He tried college again \u2014 this time at Skidmore, where he studied pottery and jewelry making \u2014 but, in spite of his selection of courses, he still didn\u2019t like it.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

    In the meantime, Jerry Greenfield (the \u201cJerry\u201d of Ben & Jerry\u2019s) was following a similar path. He majored in pre-med at Oberlin College in the hopes of one day becoming a doctor, but he had to give up on this goal when he was not accepted into medical school. On a positive note, though, his college education steered him into a more lucrative field: the world of ice cream making. He got his first peek at the ice cream industry when he worked as a scooper in the student cafeteria at Oberlin. So, fourteen years after they first met on the junior high school track team, Ben and Jerry reunited and decided to go into ice cream making big time. They moved to Burlington, Vermont \u2014 a college town in need of an ice cream parlor \u2014 and completed a $5 correspondence course from Penn State on making ice cream. After getting an A in the course \u2014 not surprising, given that the tests were open-book \u2014 they took the plunge: with their life savings of $8,000 and $4,000 of borrowed funds they set up an ice cream shop in a made-over gas station on a busy street corner in Burlington.[footnote]Lager, F. C. (1994). Ben & Jerry\u2019s: The Inside Scoop<\/em>. New York: Crown Publishers.[\/footnote]\u00a0The next big decision was which form of business ownership was best for them. This chapter introduces you to their options.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

    The Canadian Landscape<\/span><\/h1>\r\n

    Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) defines a business based upon the number of paid employees. For this reason, self-employed and \"indeterminate\" businesses are generally not included in the present publication as they do not have paid employees.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

    Accordingly, this publication defines a SME (small-to-medium enterprise) as a business establishment with 1\u2013499 paid employees, more specifically:<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n